St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital was built 60 years ago and has been expanded several times since. Walk into this southwestern Ontario hospital – like so many others blessed with serial additions – and you may quickly find yourself stymied by blind alleys, lost and anxious.
The latest expansion, though, is a makeover designed to please the patient.
It allows for “intuitive wayfinding,” providing pathways anchored by natural light and external cues to orient the patient.
As well, the new emergency department will have two doors — one for trauma and the other for patients with minor ailments. A patient with a bad case of the flu won’t be confronted with the distress of watching a car accident victim fight for his life.
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The new construction, designed by Montgomery-Sisam and Kahler-Slater, will also speed up patient flow in the emergency waiting room.
“It [won’t] look like they’re entering Union Station, with tons of people milling about and sick people lined up against the walls,” said CEO Paul Collins, whose emergency department already boasts the shortest wait times in Ontario.
Courtesy of Vancouver Coastal HealthAnything that distracts a patient from worry about his condition is welcome in hospital, including this 70-foot-long sculpture by Shain Jackson gracing the lobby of St. Mary's Hospital in Sechelt, B.C.
A 2010 survey of 1,000 women patients at Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital found that 76% felt anxious, 63% frustrated and 57% afraid when entering hospital. Patient-centred design aims to help change all that, and it’s not only happening at St. Thomas Elgin.
“Clarity of space planning is crucial to calming people down,” said Greg Colucci of Diamond Schmitt Architects, joint venture partners with Gibbs Gage Architects in the redevelopment of Alberta’s Medicine Hat Regional Hospital. To be completed in 2016, it links a pair of three-storey atria on different levels as a wayfinding device.
Colour is also put to work to help with wayfinding. Ceilings above nurses stations are raised, their vertical edges painted vividly. This signals patients on stretchers when they’re near staff.
Giving patients something interesting to look at helps distract them from worries about their condition, said Mr. Colucci.
A 70-foot-long artwork of wood and metal remnants by a First Nations artist — which runs the length of the new lobby at St. Mary’s Hospital in Sechelt, B.C. — is not meant to be a frill, but integral to the functionality of the place.
Long views to mountains, down valleys and out to the ocean are designed into the building. They allow you “a moment to take a deep breath … and maybe even move away from the fact that you’re in a hospital,” said Lauren Tindall of Vancouver Coastal Health. St. Mary’s, a Farrow Partnership Architects and Perkins + Will design, opened in October.
Ms. Tindall said one desperately ill patient described his experience at St. Mary’s, the first B.C. hospital to provide all-private rooms, as tranquil. Their windows are unusually tall, and can be opened for a whiff of the outdoors — a rarity in hospitals today.
A wide view is especially important for bedridden patients. It’s a positive distraction that supports the healing process by connecting patients to the outside world, said Stuart Elgie of Stantec Architecture, one of four design firms responsible for the newly-opened Bridgepoint Active Healthcare in Toronto.
Tom AbanPatients get therapeutic benefits as they move along the labyrinth paved into an outdoor terrace at Bridgepoint Active Healthcare.
Patient rooms there feature wall-to-wall horizontal windows giving bird’s-eye views across the city. Patients can either walk or be wheeled right into a pop-out vertical window, to take in long views from the depths of the Don Valley up to the top of the sky.
Leading architects are also trying to demystify the hospital as an institution by making it look more approachable.
Diamond Schmitt Architects takes the mass of Medicine Hat Regional, quite a large building for a smaller city, and divides the facades up into a composition of smaller volumes in different materials to avoid overwhelming the surrounding neighbourhood of single family houses.
“What we’re trying to do is just break it down and make it less imposing,” Mr. Colucci said.
Deconstruction is taken one step further at the CIBC Breast Assessment Centre at the Juravinski Hospital, to be completed next year in Hamilton, Ont. It pulls the patient waiting room out from behind the hospital’s walls and drops it into the garden, as a tiny jewel of a building.
Courtesy of Diamond Schmitt ArchitectsDiamond Schmitt and Gibbs Gage Architects designed Medicine Hat Regional Hospital in Alberta as a composition of smaller volumes to prevent it overwhelming its single-storey residential neighbours.
Patients will be spending hours in the building waiting for potentially dramatic test results, said Tarek El-Khatib of Zeidler Partnership. Their design frames the patient’s visit as a journey through an intriguing gateway, over a bridge and into a welcoming pavilion set in a garden oasis of calm. These metaphors are offered as a balm to soothe the anxiety that attends each wait.
“Architecture does affect … emotional state,” said Mr. El-Khatib. “As architects, yes, we can make a great clinic that really technically works well…[but we wanted to go] above and beyond that to alleviate the stress and allow this experience to be as comfortable as possible, given the circumstances.”
The aim: the vast majority of visitors to the Breast Assessment Centre will walk back out through the entry gateway just as healthy as they stepped in.
“If what you are about is making the pathway of care as unobstructed, as barrier free, as comfortable, as stress free, as intuitive and as patient-centred as possible … it ultimately affects how you design your facility,” said Mr. Collins.
National Post